E-commerce giant Amazon is placing a major bet on artificial intelligence (AI) startup Anthropic through a new $4 billion investment agreement. The deal provides funding for Anthropic to advance its research into high-performance foundation models.

In an announcement on social media, Anthropic revealed that the investment from Amazon will give the startup access to computing resources like Amazon Web Services Trainium chips to power its AI development.

In return, Anthropic will offer enhanced support for Amazon’s own natural language AI system called Bedrock. Specifically, Anthropic will provide secure customization and fine-tuning of models that Amazon teams can build on top of Bedrock.

Through the agreement, Amazon is also taking a minority stake in Anthropic. The AI startup stated that this investment does not impact its governance structure.

Founded by former researchers from OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, Anthropic aims to develop safe and beneficial artificial intelligence. This new injection of funds from Amazon will aid their cutting-edge research.

The investment comes on the heels of a $100 million funding round Anthropic secured in August from South Korean telecom firm SK Telecom. The two companies are collaborating on a multilingual AI model.

Anthropic has been active within the AI ethics community. They recently joined technology giants like Google and Microsoft in launching the Frontier Model Forum. This organization seeks to self-regulate the development of advanced AI models.

With Amazon’s backing, Anthropic is well-positioned to shape the future of artificial intelligence in a responsible manner. The startup is already advising the U.S. government on AI safety initiatives critical to protecting national infrastructure.